Tuesday, July 10, 2007

the left hand column

The Postmaster uses a couple of embedded routines in the left hand column to provide Humboldt-related content from around the web. First there a Video collector that actually seems to work. Along with vids of the People Project protest around the corner from my house and one of Arcata's Redwood Park, there's a video I shot on New Year's Even on the Plaza showing one of our fine local samba drum troupes. (See above.) Keyword Arcata?

It's the "Words still matter" section that fails routinely. The key word seems to be Humboldt, which turns out to be a poor choice. More often than not, it doesn't matter, not to HumCo locals anyway. The aggregator apparently pulls up the top four hits on Google news for the word, which in theory seems like you'd get local news. The trouble is, the county's namesake, Alexander Von Humboldt, was a popular guy, and all sorts of stuff is named after him. As noted in Wikipedia: All of the following places are named for Humboldt:

So today three of the news hits are about things in Chicago's Humboldt Park: a car crash and a Latin jazz fest, and the other is about the Humboldt in Canada. Sure it might change later this evening, but most often it just doesn't work.